James Ransone

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: It Chapter Two is a great bookend, but where's the tl;dr version?

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 3rd September 2019

    2017’s It was such a huge success that it has reignited not only a demand for more Stephen King adaptations, but also a desire for high quality scares again. But there’s a downside to being the highest grossing horror film of all time - and I’m not talking about Pennywise making it harder for real-life clowns like Bongo Bonzo And Catty Watty Boom Boom (both local to me - I searched the directory) to find work. No, the downside is that, for this follow-up, the filmmaking team appear to have been left more unchecked. This sequel is far longer than it needs to be, far funnier than it makes sense to be and filled with so many meme-worthy visuals that it seems to have been made purely for Twitter retorts. In short, it’s an overlong carnival for the senses, and that’s in addition to Pennywise continuing to give clowns like Bongo Bonzo and Catty Watty a bad name.

  • Sinister

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 5th October 2012

    It irritates the hell out of me when people use obviously fake computers in movies. A black screen with green text like it's 1982. A free-typed database command like 'FIND ALL GUNSHOT VICTIMS IN SAN DIEGO'. An analogue beep as a search engine returns its results. So I am delighted to report that in horror movie Sinister, Ethan Hawke uses realistic search terms in Google. He talks to people on iChat. He uses real commands on dropdown menus, moves stuff to his recycle bin, and encodes video into .mov files. How scary is the film? Um ... it's ... did I mention how good the computer bits are?